On a hot, windy "red-flag"-warning Labor Day in 2007, a spark on Plumas County forestland ignited a conflagration that would ultimately char 65,000 acres in northeastern California. Hundreds of firefighters needed more than two weeks to contain the so-called Moonlight Fire, which killed 15 million trees some of them more than 400 years old and reduced 46,000 acres of public land to moonscape.
Then the fire fight turned to the courtroom.